Belated Taking Stock of the Month: April

In the fracas of the last few weeks, I didn't have the opportunity to say many goodbyes in Switzerland. I have happily been given that opportunity through an invitation to stay in Karen's home for a few days before making the final journey back down to Narbonne with the last of my things. So I've been decompressing in Grandvaux, a village not far from my (now former) home of Chexbres, and today I head back down to Narbonne. It's been really nice to be able to spend a few days saying farewell to the people and places that have made up my life over the last year, without feeling like my head is going to explode with all the things I need to remember to do to organize my move. I've been sleeping in, getting in some gentle runs in the vineyards and lunching with friends who I'll miss terribly but who promise to visit and I think they might just mean it (one of the benefits to living in the south of France).

With the first few days of May behind me, I can reflect on the month of April with a certain degree of detachment that is allowing for some objectivity and just a little bit of insight; the kind of insight that arises with hindsight but that you wish you’d had the faculty for at the time. So in no particular order, here are my insights from the month of April:

1. I tend to ask the world of myself and others.

2. I can be hard on myself.

3. There does not have to be any rhythm or reason for calamity; or put more colloquially, **** happens.

My last post described a little bit of how it hit the fan in the last week of April, but it was certainly an incomplete account of the variety of mishaps and unforeseen complications and pressures that converged to create an experience unlike any I’ve had before or wish to have again. I didn’t mention that this was a particularly high-pressure month for me at work, and at a certain point my manager and I agreed that taking a few sick days (read: mental health days) would be a good idea for everyone concerned. That happened right about the time that my laptop, my window to work in my Vancouver office, was starting to fry, my Swiss cell phone ran out of credit while in France and their website went down so that I couldn’t recharge it, the van rental company couldn’t reach me by phone so they sent me an email to tell me that my credit card was being declined, and that by the way, the charge was three times what I had expected because I did the math on the extra kilometers incorrectly, and I couldn’t make sense of what my new landlady was telling me I had to do to get my gas connected: it was either that I should stay home because she had made an appointment for the plumber to come and do it, or I had to call the plumber and make an appointment for him to come and do it, or I should go to the gas office to make the appointment for the plumber to come (and I still haven’t figure it out, but I do have an appointment at the gas office for when I return, which will hopefully result in someone connecting me).

Somewhere around this particular point, right after I got my phone working and Michael called to say that someone had crashed into the van on his way back to Lausanne, I noticed that I began to ask myself a disempowering and ultimately useless question: why is this happening? When a series of things go wrong that are seemingly unrelated and totally random, it’s hard not to begin to think along the lines of: what did I do to deserve this? Is this a test? If it is a test, who is administering it and what is the pass mark? I’m a painstakingly organized person, I’m a good planner, I understand that the devil is in the details and I build contingencies into my plans and can generally adapt to rapidly changing rules; how can this be happening to me?

None of which, of course, is useful, and all of which was an attempt to do what we cannot help doing every single day: assign causality to events in an attempt to cognitively organize our worlds. I don't know if I recognized this at the time or not, but I did somehow have the wherewithal to make the decision to focus my thoughts on a better question: what can I do in the next hour that will move me forward towards my desired objective? That became further distilled into: what can I do in the next ten minutes that will move me forward?

And this somehow got me through it.

And I somehow did it on a vegan diet.

And I’m going to stop being hard on myself for the abandoned training plans and abandoned objective to lean out. So here’s what I did accomplish in April:

- 33 hrs of riding
- 6 hours of running
- 30 minutes of swimming
- some serious heavy lifting of boxes

And to finish my round up of the month, we move on to my favourite bit to reflect on: recipe of the month. For those who think it would be insane if I had actually been experimenting with vegan recipes over the last four weeks, you would be absolutely right. April’s recipe of the month is less of a recipe and more of an adaptation of a favourite standby which, in under three minutes, can be slapped together when everything else feels like it’s falling apart:

Peanut Butter and Apple Sandwich

Spread organic peanut butter on one side of two slices of thick cut whole-wheat bread, add thinly sliced apple slices inbetween, ensuring that the peanut butter covers the apple surfaces to avoid oxidation. Pack in a ziplock bag for a bomb-proof vegan sandwich which can be squished at the bottom of a bag, left unrefrigerated for a long period of time, rediscovered later and still taste good with black coffee at a road side stop.

Now it’s time to turn the page on the next chapter. A few more words from my favourite small bear:

“Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other was the left, but he never could remember how to begin”

I know exactly what he means; and I think I'm close to figuring it out.

Hanging in Here

I’m still here, but only just. Since signing the apartment lease in France three weeks ago, life has been hectic in a way that brings a new meaning to the word. I'm not sure what I was expecting, having conceived and orchestrated a relocation between two countries that I am not native to, nor speak the language of, in a three-week time horizon. I feel like my world has been turned upside down, I’ve been turned inside out, hung out to dry and am hanging by a thread. If I hadn't had the help of two very good ex-pat friends, Karen and Pam, who pitched in and came down to Narbonne to help unload without hesitation, and the sainthood of Michael who drove the truck between Swtizerland and the south of France in one day (over 1,300 km's) while trying to arrange his own move up to Munich, I'm not sure I would have lived to tell the tale. Actually, I'm still not quite sure that I have.

One day after the official D-day of April 30th (D stands for Derangement, as in the corybantic state of mind that takes over on the last day of the month when, after days of packing, painting and cleaning, one has to remove oneself and all traces of oneself from one abode by 12pm sharp, take up residence in a new abode, do inspections at either end with respective agencies and then in my case, negotiate an emigration and a u-haul border crossing in between), I am still in a state of being semi-moved. I have personal effects in both countries but no fully assembled furniture in either. All in all, this is not an enjoyable or sanity-promoting place to be. I'm not even going to talk about how my Canadian credit card company froze my cards on the day I was trying to pay for the moving van in Switzerland and then buy some large appliances - like a fridge - in France, my British bank blocked ATM withdrawals for no apparent reason on the very same day and the only account I could access, my Swiss account, had no money in it since I had diligently transferred all of it out in preparation for my Swiss evacuation. I also won't mention how, while on a VoIP call with Visa made from my laptop in a wifi cafe, answering a series of questions designed to infuriate the most patient person on a good day, my laptop's fan malfunctioned and it became a burning hot slate of aluminum which I had to handle with napkins while trying to explain in French that I needed my bill right away. You can't make this stuff up, and nor would you want to.

As for training, all ideas of scheduled exercise were put on hold three weeks ago when I realized this relocation might be more complicated than my previous moves, although carrying boxes up and down staircases in 19th-century buildings with no elevators has to count for something in a training program. Being vegan is the only thing I can profess to be sticking with, though I would hardly describe my diet as model right now: peanut butter sandwiches have made a strong comeback and feature as the center piece of at least two meals a day. I’ve otherwise been grabbing anything that looks butter-free in early-morning bakeries, picking egg off premade Niscoise salads at autoroute reststops and drinking a lot of black coffee. Needless to say, my grand plan to cut out sugar and flour to lean out for racing has been long abandoned. Any inclination I had to do an early summer race is out the window and the thought of Ironman in September seems obscure and almost laughable (because if I didn't laugh, I would cry). In my brief moments of objectivity and/or lucidity, I tell myself that the desire to pursue my goals will reignite when I am firmly settled in my new French abode and can resume training, along with other semblances of a normal routine such as getting up and having a shower in the morning (haven't figured out how to get the gas connected in my new home yet, but I'm working towards a solution with the authorities).

I will write a better update when I feel like my world is the right way up again. I’m hoping that will come sooner rather than later.

Words to Live By, from a Small Bear

Some of my favourite quotes come from a book about a very wise and simple bear, Winnie the Pooh.

'Promise me you'll always remember: you're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think'

It was this particular quote, spoken by Christopher Robin to a trepidatious Pooh, that I held in my mind as I sat in a realtor's office in the French town of Narbonne last week, signing a 3-year lease on an apartment that will become my new home on May 1st. I was doing my best to understand the pages and pages of French terms and conditions while trying to remember the long list of questions that the website Just Landed: A guide to Housing and Rentals in France said I should ask before signing, while also trying to understand whether I was eligible to rent property in France at all given that I am not a resident and have no revenues in the country. Since they let me sign, took my deposit from me and gave me keys, I assume that I am.

Those who've been following my blog for a while now will know it's no secret that Switzerland is not a land I am enamored with. It's a beautiful country with much to offer, but there have been one too many aspects that, while fun to make fun of, have meant that I've never quite felt it's a place I want to call home. It's not just about the lack of vegan-friendly food, really it's not. There are a multitude of factors that led to the decision to move on, and the one year mark seemed as good a time as any to pull the plug. And I suppose that yes, everything being smothered in Gruyere hasn't helped.

The decision to leave Swtizerland is accompanied with a second, more difficult decision. On May 1st, Michael and I will part ways. He is heading north to Munich to pursue an MBA, and I am heading south to pursue my dream of assimilating into French culture in a quiet corner of the country and, with a little time, holding my own in a passionate French sidewalk cafe debate.

When I set off on a road trip last week to find a new place to call home with nothing but a Michelin map, a Lonely Planet guide and a print out of a list of every triathlon club from from Nice to Toulouse to guide my route, one voice in my head was telling me 'this is crazy' while the other rejoined 'it's the things that you didn't do, not the things you did do, that you'll regret most when you look back on your life'. Over the din of those bickering voices, I kept reminding myself of Christopher Robin's words to Pooh as I drove from east to west, from town to town, looking for something that I couldn't quite articulate but that I hoped I would recognise when I found it.

I can't deny that it doesn't complicate things when looking for a place to live when you are a) vegan, b) training for an Ironman, c) know nobody and d) can only conjugate verbs in the present tense of the local language. To take care of (a), I had decided that being able to find a decent selection of vegan-friendly places to eat and shop is near the top of my criteria list, and having people to train with would take care of (b) and (c) in one shot. I'm hoping that said people will be kind and patient as I overcome (d).

I passed through dusty Provence with high hopes I might find some of what I was looking for in the region to it's west, Languedoc. Languedoc is a bit like Provence, only a little greener and less overrun by the English renovating farmhouses in droves. It's a region of vineyards, lakes, gorges, tiny villages, antique shops and slow-moving trains. The coastline is considerably less populated than the Cote d'Azur, and with my own eyes I saw miles of white sandy beaches with no waterfront development whatsoever (this seems to be a well-kept secret of France, so please don't tell anybody).

When I drove into the town of Narbonne on my second to last day, I had a seen a lot of pretty towns, met a lot of charming people, but had not found one locale that had that je-ne-sais-quoi that I was looking for. I knew that Narbonne had a triathlon club, but I also thought that at a population of 50,000, it was going to be too big to have the French quaintness I was looking for.

Was I ever wrong. I arrived on market day, and the long canal that runs through the heart of the town was lined with fruits, vegetables, pottery, antiques and designer clothing knockoffs. The market, it turns out, is an extension of a large daily covered market that runs every day - a whole covered area serving an overwhelming selection of fruits and vegetables, not to mention mountains of olives, right in the heart of the town...

I was already in love.

When the third vendor engaged me in friendly conversation about where I was from and what I was doing in Narbonne, I was sold. Then I walked through the heart of the old town - narrow streets, a beautiful old cathedral, boutique stores. Hang on, I should just stop describing and post some pictures (the lazy blogger's solution):

The Main Square:

The Canal:

An old town street:


The Cathedral:

Where I'll be buying my shoes:


And last but certainly not least, one of the best outdoor Olympic size swimming pools I've ever seen:


I proceeded to wander into realtor office after realtor office, asking if they had any one bedroom apartments, and I stammered through my long list of criteria (must have balcony or terrace, must not smell like backed up plumbing - so common in older buildings in the south of France). On the seventh time, I got lucky beyond my wildest dreams and was prepared to pay just about anything for the light and airy old town apartment on a pedestrianized street with a new bathroom, new kitchen, terrace and over-height ceilings. Again, luckily, it was in my price range and I thus found myself signing papers and handing over a deposit the very next morning.

So there we have it. I am actually going to live in France. One chapter is drawing to a close for me and another one is just beginning, and all it took to make it happen was a roadtrip and a bit of gusto.

I'm reminded that it is sometimes the thought of doing something scary that is more scary than the doing, and fear of the unknown seems to diminish when you embrace the unknown and pull it close. I think Pooh knew this, too:

Piglet: "Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?"

"Supposing it didn't," said Pooh after careful thought.

Piglet was comforted by this.

And No Myserty

I have been procrastinating about doing the research on why my iron levels are improving as a vegan out of fear that it would take me down a rabbit hole of industry-sponsored research and perpetuated misinformation from arcane sources (as my dairy products research did). My job was done for me yesterday when, at kilometer 95 of a 135 km ride, my friend Amy suggested a straightforward and, it turns out, veritable explanation. Amy has a background in nutrition, and her suggestion left me immediately feeling foolish for thinking that there needed to be anything more complicated or ground-breaking than the following: there is plenty of iron in plants. Except that this was somehow ground-breaking to me: I thought (and had been told by my doctor) that the amount of bioavailable iron in plant sources came a very distant second to that found in animal products, measure for measure.

It turns out this is not entirely true.

The RDA for iron is 15 mg/day for pre-menopausal women (or 10 mg/day for adult men and for post-menopausal women).

Here's a quick profile of the amount of iron in the foods I eat in a typical day:

As part of my homemade granola:
1/2 cup of oats 4mg
1/2 cup bran 6mg
2 TB almonds 1.3mg
2 TB pumpkin seeds 2.5mg

As part of a typical lunchtime salad:
3 cups spinach 6mg
1/4 cup dried figs 2mg
1/2 cup beats 1.4mg
4 TB sunflower seeds 2.4mg

As part of a mid-afternoon homous dip:
4 tbs tahini 2.4mg
100g chickpeas 3.1mg
1/2 cup broccoli florets 0.6mg

As part of an evening curry:
1/2 cup lentils 3.2mg
4 TB cashew nuts 2.0mg
1/2 cup potato 1.4mg
1/2 cup green beans 0.6mg

So on an average day, I am getting around 38.9mg of iron which, as those who have been paying attention so far will have noticed, is more than double my RDA. If I ate tofu (hard to find in Switzerland), I'd be getting an extra 13.2 mg per cup. As a comparison of the plant world against the animal world, 1 medium (144 g) grilled steak contains 4.3mg of iron.

One note on the bioavailabiity of plant sources of iron: in isolation, the body does not absorb plant sources of iron as well as it does the iron found in meat. However, by including foods containing vitamin C at each meal (like citrus fruits, fruit juices, berries, tomato, capsicum, broccoli and cabbage), the level of iron absorption from plant sources is increased to a level very similar to that of meat.

Having done this little tally after today's rather epic ride (I forgot to mention: the 135 kms included one 20 km 1,100m climb), I also found the scientific data I was hoping to find without too much trouble: there are indeed some (non-industry sponsored) studies that show that typical eating patterns of vegetarians indicate they actually consume more iron than meat eaters, and that vegans actually eat the most iron of all (Virginia Messina, M.P.H., R.D., and Mark Messina, Ph.D., Crown, 1996).

So there is nothing particularly mysterious about my improved iron stores. And those extra stores came in handy on that climb today.

No Picnic

I simply have to post some extracts from an email I received from the Tour de Mont Blanc this morning. I'm sure that some of their intended meanings have been lost in translation, but that aside, they have some rather strict rules that make North American ultras look like an unsupervised Sunday picnic. I can't believe they are going to weigh my bag at the exit of aid stations, and I'm not sure why I would need to carry a needle and thread with me; perhaps for some self-administered sutures?

The email opens with:

"Our regulations are precise in all imaginable dimensions: the ultra-trails in the mountains are difficult races. You must be totally aware of the difficulties of the event before leaving, be autonomous, know how to deal with difficult climatic conditions, not to cry when you fall, and it is not the role of the volunteers to deal with muscle pain, digestive problems or any other minor aches and pains. As we’ve said it is an adventure. It is not an organised trip but a race. We must therefore concentrate our efforts on the quality of the assistance. "

I think this means that their budget for medical assistance has been reduced. It continues:

We have altered a certain number of regulations. This is the same for everybody, whether you be in front or behind, large or small, man or woman. Read carefully, because the adventure starts here.

1. One back-pack only for the entire course

Tagged at the distribution of race bibs, your pack will faithfully follow you everywhere. Its weight must be a minimum of 2 kg, including at least 1 litre of water. It will be necessary to have this weight at the exit of all of the refreshment points, where there will be controls. The weight of the pack must never be less than 1kg at any point in the race.

2. Under the benevolent eye of the volunteers

As in previous years, the volunteers are there to help you, but also to make sure that the rules are respected by everybody. Amongst them the GCV (‘kind flying stewards’) have precise orders to follow, notably that which concerns the immediate application of time penalties when the rules are not respected.

3. The obligatory equipment is obligatory

It is obvious, but you must at all times be carrying your obligatory equipment yourself. Question of security, and once again, to be fair vis-à-vis the other contestants.

Obligatory material:

• personal cup or tumbler 15cl minimum

• stock of water minimum 1 litre,
• two torches in good working condition with replacement batteries,
• survival blanket,
• whistle,
• adhesive elastic band enable making a bandage or a strapping (mini 80cm x 3 cm),
• food reserve,
• protective raincoat for bad mountain weather,
• running trousers or leggings (au minimum pedal pushers covering the knees),
• cap or bandana.
• Required by the frontier police forces: identity papers

Very strongly recommended:

• mobile phone with option enabling its use in the three countries (put in one’s repertoire the security numbers of the organisation, do not hide one’s number and do not forget to set off with recharged batteries)
• gloves, warm clothes indispensable in the case of cold weather forecasts

Advised (list not definitive):

• telescopic sticks
• change of clothing
• compass
• knife
• string
• sunscream
• vaseline
• anti-overheating cream
• needle and thread

I can see this is not going to be like the as-long-as-everyone-crosses-the-finish-line-upright-we-don't care-how-you-got-there attitude of ultrarunning in North America. I am certainly glad that there will be some Kind Flying Stewards on hand, because I am already feeling some mild anxiety over what I have to keep in mind when my brain is a little starved of oxygen five hours into the event.

One to Watch

I just came across this individual, the first vegan to compete in the invite-only Ultraman Hawaii (a 3-day/320 mile double-Ironman distance triathlon):

http://www.richroll.com/

He clocked the second fastest swim split and finished 10th overall, all on six months of training. He's also a father of four, an attorney, a filmmaker and a writer. Who says men can't do more than one thing at a time? The Marathon de Sables (6 day 151 mile run across the Sahara Desert) and Badwater (135 mile run across Death Valley) are both on his race list this year and I'll be watching his results.

In my humble little world, I am excited to report that the Tour de Mont Blanc organizing committee has officially accepted me into the 50km ultramarathon this year. It looks some persuasion, in the form of many emails back and forth concerning a race I won last year which I requested be added to the list of qualifying races. With a name like 'Walk in The Park', a 50km ultra in a Canadian interior town called 'Kamloops', I can't blame them for thinking I was making it up.

I love how the French language lends itself so well to exasperated arguing, even by email: "mais je l'ai gangé, je l'ai gagné' (but I won it, I won it!) I pleaded many times. They finally checked the race's website and contacted the race director, and have accepted it as a qualifying race and have accepted me into this year's event in August. This means I will be running a very mountainous 50km event 5 weeks before my first Ironman; perhaps not what a coach would advise me to do, but I don't have a coach so I'm doing it. I'm sure Rich Roll would agree.

And the results are in!

I had my 'email appointment' with the very sunny Dr. Albert today (how British GP practices have leapt into the 21st century!), and he was pleased to inform me that my blood tests were nothing but good news. I have no signs of anemia whatsoever, and most interestingly, my serum ferritin (measure of stored iron) is higher than it's been in the last 4 years at 31.2 ug/L. As a reminder, I've been getting my haem and ferritin levels tested since I started running seriously 4 years ago, and the latter has always been dismally low (9 ug/L at it's lowest, 19 ug/L at it's highest in spite of eating as much lean meat as I could ingest, and also supplementing with cocktails of ferrous gluconate, ferrous fumerate and liquid iron). Even more remarkable, I took this test at the end of a month where I quadrupled my riding volumes and right at the end of 7 consecutive running days in Cyprus.

No one could be more delighted with this news than me, although Dr. Albert comes a close second. He enthusiastically instructed me to 'keep up the spinach!' Proving the power of the psychosomatic, I suddenly feel exceptionally energized and am wondering what I should do with these extra stores of iron. I think I might up my running volumes. And needless to say, I am now going to feverishly research a possible explanation for how I have achieved greater levels of stored iron as a vegan than at any time in my meat-eating past. Since 20% of the female population are struggling to do the same, I feel a mild delusion of grandeur that I might be on the cusp of something big.